I recently booked a Deloitte commercial shooting in Nashville. I wrote a post about the audition and booking process for this project.
The shoot was set for Monday, May 6th, so I set out in my camper van Sunday night. I built a camper van out of an old FedEx van back in 2021 and it’s been a great way to travel for acting gigs that are local hire only.
I ended up parking in a rest stop about an hour from Nashville, set my alarm for the next morning and settled in for the night.
I arrived at the designated parking lot and was met by a PA who provided me a parking pass for the day and walked me to location which was a few blocks away. As we walked, she gave me some details about the shoot; the role I was playing was artist. There were 2 commercials being shot and today was the last day. My commercial only had me in it. The background actors scheduled in the afternoon were for a second commercial.
Location was a hotel and they had the bottom floor (dressing room, wardrobe and makeup) and the floor above (large conference room) rented for the day. Wardrobe and makeup hadn’t arrived yet, so the PA told me breakfast was upstairs and had me wait on the first floor. As I ate breakfast, wardrobe arrived and we went through the clothing options. The rack had 10-15 costume choices and he had me try on different ones, he then took pictures and sent them to the director. As we were waiting on the director to make his choice, the Deloitte people came down to introduce themselves. There were 5 of them and they also went through the costume pictures. They decided on the 5th outfit I tried on.
After wardrobe was decided, I took changed back into my clothes and went to hair and makeup where I also had my hand tattoos covered. The whole process took about 2 hours with the hand makeup taking the longest.
While we were finishing makeup, they radioed down that they were ready for me and we headed upstairs. The conference room was huge, had 15 foot ceilings and exposed brick. It was decorated like an artists’s loft, with paintings everywhere, tables with paint supplies, a compressor and a huge sculpture in the center of the room hanging from the ceiling. There were about 30 crew members setting up the room and I was met by the director who cast me and we went over my actions. We ended up making adjustments and redoing the scene 6 times. In between takes, the director would head back to the room where the Deloitte people were watching everything to get their input before coming back to me with more adjustments. Then took 4 more takes to adjust for camera speed, and to make minor action adjustments.
We wrapped after an hour of shooting, had lunch and I headed back to Atlanta. Total time in Nashville was 4 hours.
Simon Shih 